Photo Finish: Cooking with Steve Pyke

“It all comes about from the beauty of the working tool,” the photographer Steve Pyke says of his forthcoming book, “Earthward” (Nazraeli). It is an elegant volume, with a creamy white cover and photographs of ancient tools from Great Dixter, the estate of the famed British garden-writer Christopher Lloyd. The book might seem like an anomaly for Steve, who is best known for his portraiture, much of which has appeared in this magazine. However, he has a number of ongoing still-life projects, some of which have been published by Nazraeli, including “Post Mortem and Post Partum,” which features medical tools used for births and deaths.

I had a chance to talk to Steve in his kitchen, about his fascination with tools, as he brandished a few culinary ones and made bolognese—enough “to last for days.” Here’s what I found out:

—His interest in tools is motivated by patina: “There’s something about the deterioration of things and how often they become more beautiful as they age.” The fork on the cover of “Earthward” is roughly seventy years old and probably had tongs an inch longer when new. When Pyke was still living in England, his gardener, William, brought the fork over from nearby Great Dixter. The tool was the spark for a thirteen-year inventory project, culminating in “Earthward.”

—Pyke does not consider himself a still-life photographer. He says, “It’s completely bonkers the way I shoot.” He hung the tools with fishing wire in a barn at Great Dixter, and as they spun around he took pictures. “I’m not that interested, myself, in the technical side of photography,” he says.

—The garden tools of Great Dixter, as classifed by Fergus Garrett, the head gardener there, are separated into four groups: Grass & Meadow, Vegetable Garden, Planting and Pruning, and Tools for Woods. Beyond this basic structure, Steve organized the book based on his own aesthetic, and the result speaks of the generations of gardeners who made Great Dixter what it still is to this day: great.

—Steve’s tool of choice is his 2.8 Rolleiflex, his first and (with a few exceptions) only camera. “It’s like an extension of my arm and my eye,” he says. With it, he has captured a vast array of people and things—neatly stored and displayed on photo paper: “Photographers essentially become ontologists; they become these people that collect.”

“There’s something clean and kind of spiritual about tools in a way,” Pyke says. “There’s something that’s very permanent that’s placed in tools.” “Earthward” is a reminder of what is essential—what Pyke calls “real work.”

“Secateurs No. 2.”

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